The problem underlying commons neglect is not that there are too few
people involved in the project, it's that there's too small a
proportion of those people who have the interest or time to help
maintain the commons. If anything, it gets worse the larger the
community becomes. Lots of people go to the beach, but not many
people take a trash bag with them and pick up garbage when they see
it. The more popular the beach, the harder it becomes to keep it
clean.

I've been working on OpenStack, off and on, for almost 9 years. (I'm US based; fwiw). What I've found in my career is that it's incredibly hard to get an OpenStack jobs with enough freedom to help with the commons. Many jobs before my current one wanted a solid line to be drawn between the exact patches you were working on and how it benefited the company you worked for. This made it difficult to work on anything but high-impact bugs and features, aside from the time I used, sometimes under the radar, to review code and keep things flowing.

With the commons; it's incredibly difficult to draw those lines. That means that these contributors, working for a company that only has interest in supporting OpenStack in ways that have a direct, measurable impact on their product, are consuming from the commons but are not contributing back.

I don't know what the solution is; but the above represents the reality for a large number of OpenStack contributors. If you're one of them, please know I appreciate your contributions, and contributing where you can. If you're not; maybe spend a few more minutes thinking about and contributing to the commons since not everyone can.

Jay Faulkner

TC Member

Ironic PTL